The Fourth Industrial revolution brings wide automatisation in various fields, thus people with low skills become less competitive in the labour market (The EP resolution on creating a competitive EU labour market for the 21st century, 2015). According to European Commission Recommendations on Key Competences for Lifelong Learning, one of the core skills necessary to work and live in the 21st century is a sense of initiative and entrepreneurship, that refers to an individual's ability to turn ideas into action. Higher education institutions must support students to acquire these skills. This is even more important as we notice signs of a cooling economy and young people are more vulnerable at difficult times.
The goal of the project is to help students to acquire crucial competencies (entrepreneurship, collaboration, complex problem solving, sustainability and social innovation) through volunteering activities (supported with training on different topics), which would involve solving real-life problems through social innovations.
To achieve this, we have several tasks to fulfil:
1. Enabling communities to take the initiative and tackle challenges themselves (creating social initiative canvassing guidebook and template, training community managers);
2. Enabling students to lead initiatives with sustainable long-term impact (providing support for running initiatives, creating e-trainings for initiative coordinators and volunteers, preparing volunteer management guidebook);
3. Improving non-formal competencies recognition systems so it would benefit young people (make recommendations for non-formal competence recognition, create non-formal competence recognition auto-approval standards for initiatives and competence assessment task bank).
Project partners expect to directly involve not less than 1000 students into project activities while running a project and lay the foundation for better community engagement in partner organisation after the project ends.
Consortium consists of 3 forward-looking, strong universities - Vilnius University (VU), Jean Monnet University (UJM) and University of Granada (UGR), which stresses the importance of extracurricular activities and the benefits they bring, embrace innovative pedagogical approaches and focus on positive societal impact and youth organisations - Vilnius University Students' Representation (VUSR) and Fédération des Associations de Saint Etienne Etudiantes (FASEE) that have experience working hands-on with students needs, their engagement and empowerment, promotion of volunteering and student led initiatives. Project management encompasses vital principles of the project by having a student-led organisation to be the leader of the whole project.
Most of the project activities involve all partners, so it allows for everyone to participate in monitoring and to evaluate both activities and results. IO's will be developed in iterations, thus creating feedback loops (for consortium partners and activity participants) which will help improve final results.
Project ambition is that all produced results would not only become everyday practices for partner organisations but will also be widely used by other youth organisations as well as higher education institutions. Thus, all results will be presented in initiatives success symposiums (multiplier events) in each country and will be freely accessed on the project website, for use and modification. Moreover, other institutional networks will be additional formats, which should ensure project results sustainability as partners hope to transfer all those results into network collaboration practice.